I’m reading the book “Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You” by Sam Gosling. The author does research on how your stuff reveals your personality, particularly along the lines of The Big Five personality traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. (They spell OCEAN, which makes them easier to remember.)

Gosling covers a lot of stuff about stuff and personality in the book, so much that I’m never going to remember all of it, but he does provide interesting exercises that help the reader pin down his or her own personality.

One of my favorite exercises is to make a list of ten favorite songs. Music, apparently, is very good at revealing personality. When Gosling has his students do this exercise, the other students in class can very easily figure out which list of favorite music goes with which student.

Of course I had to make a list of ten favorite songs, but it wasn’t easy. While I can pin down the bands without much trouble, sometimes there were several songs from one band that I liked equally. Here’s my list for today. (I can’t promise that tomorrow’s list will be exactly the same.)

1. Hold Back the Rain – Duran Duran

2. Human – The Killers

3. Dodo – Dave Matthews

4. Very – Moby

5. Don’t Change – INXS

6. The Voice – Ultravox

7. Ih-Ah! – The Devin Townsend Project

8. Original of the Species – U2

9. Grace of God – Flogging Molly

10. Only – Nine Inch Nails

Now that I’ve given you a glimpse of my personality, is there anything about this list that reveals something unexpected about me? Or is it a pretty good representation of who I am?

Your turn! Please share your favorite ten songs in the comments, on Facebook or on your own blog. If you share on your blog, let me know in the comments so I can check it out.

Hi, Christopher – Thanks for sharing your favorite songs. Your list in comparison to mine and the ones my high school cohorts shared on Facebook makes me wonder if these lists of songs can also help snoops figure out the age of the person with each list. I remember most of the songs on your list from when I was a child, but a number of my favorites are from my high school to college years.

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